Converting a Run-Down Power Plant

A ruin on the banks of the Hudson River, the closed Glenwood power plant site has haunted the city of Yonkers for decades.

The plant closed 50 years ago and is an abandoned industrial hulk like many others. But now, the huge structure of four redbrick buildings is being boldly transformed into the PowerHouse, an arts-focused event complex with eventual plans for restaurants, a hotel and a marina, at a waterside location in Westchester County.

Developed by the Goren Group, the multiphase, $150 million for-profit project hopes to attract art exhibitions that might otherwise be held in Manhattan locations like the Park Avenue Armory.

But even if the gallery crowd is slow to arrive, signs of the building’s revival are proving uplifting for residents, local officials and real estate brokers.

“Other plans never quite hit right,” said William V. Cuddy Jr., an executive vice president with CBRE, who has worked as a broker in the area for three decades but is not affiliated with the project. “But if you can take a dilapidated piece of real estate in a prime location and bring it online for a creative alternative use, that’s a good thing.”

So far, in the $70 million first phase of the project, which began in 2013 and is expected to be finished by 2016, the Goren Group has extensively cleaned the site, which meant clearing mounds of dirt and broken bricks and even throwing out old mattresses. Workers also had to stabilize walls, ceilings and floors at the site, which has essentially been vacant since 1963 and is not a local landmark.

Those expecting to find a basic white-walled room to swill wine while admiring sculptures may be disappointed. Determined to preserve a warts-and-all look, the Goren Group, which was founded by Lela Goren, has not touched some walls that are almost completely covered by graffiti, including a crisp image of a man with an eagle perched on his head and more ominous scrawls like “Heart of Darkness.”

Also staying are four floor-mounted rotaries — power-plant leftovers as big as jet engines — that will ultimately appear to be spinning, courtesy of some images projected onto them, Ms. Goren said.

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Lela Goren, founder of the Goren Group, plans to turn the building into the PowerHouse, an arts-focused event complex.CreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times

“It’s very important for me from an aesthetics perspective to preserve the raw industrial feeling,” she said during a recent tour, bounding across skinny catwalks with confidence as pigeons scattered and a train thundered past. “I want to respect what’s there.”

Indeed, the Tate Modern, a gallery in a former power plant in London, she added, was unwise to remove so many of its antique details.

Many of the floors and outdoor spaces of the PowerHouse have the potential to captivate; at the very least, the site affords a front and center view of New Jersey’s unspoiled Palisades cliffs. And owing to its proximity to the water, provides clear views up and down the Hudson, as if from the prow of a ship.

But the showstopper may be the turbine hall, whose bottom floor sweeps across 17,000 square feet, and whose ceiling is a neck-craning 110 feet in the air; 3,000 people can mill about inside, according to the developer.

The $80 million phase two, which could take a decade to complete, includes plans for restaurants, a 90-room hotel and a 22-slip marina, which would replace a small pump house.

The bases of the two smokestacks may become meeting rooms.

With an adaptive-reuse project of this scale, complexity and risk, walking into a bank and asking for a construction loan is not really feasible, developers say.

Ms. Goren has used her own capital, and this winter bought out her original partner, Ron Shemesh, a local plastics manufacturer who was forced to close his nearby business after it incurred damage from Hurricane Sandy.

She is also seeking equity partners, who she said she would introduce to the site by way of a 15-person speedboat that docks at the Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Later, she hopes to buy a ferry to shuttle event guests up the river.

But for the most part, Ms. Goren is relying on public financing, in the form of an A to Z of tax credits. For instance, she’s on track to obtain state credits that are awarded to projects that take on polluted sites, like PowerHouse’s, where coal was once burned; they could be worth as much as $20 million, Ms. Goren said.

Similarly, federal and state historic credits for preserving a structure of this type, which was designed by Charles A. Reed and Allen H. Stem, a team that worked on Grand Central Terminal, may count for $25 million.

“They’re why this is so doable,” said Ms. Goren, who worked on site acquisition when she was with the Extell Development Company, and who later partnered with Extell for the condo conversion of the historic Greenwich Village building where she lives today.

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Some of the walls in the old power plant are almost completely covered by graffiti.CreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times

Another hurdle involves parking, which is required under city code but hard to fit on the narrow site. An initial proposal to build a two-story garage in a next-door park did not sit well with some neighbors, said Mike Spano, the mayor of Yonkers, who strongly supports the project, which sits a few feet from a commuter train station, the Glenwood stop on Metro-North Railroad.

In fact, Mayor Spano sees it as a key piece of the redevelopment of the waterfront in a city once vibrant with elevator, sugar and hat factories that in recent decades had become somewhat frayed. And many of the new commercial waterfront tenants are art-related businesses, he pointed out, like studios and galleries planned for a former jail.

What is clear, he added, is that the power plant, which has often ended up on endangered-building lists, should not be torn down. “Neighbors may be cautious about it, but they’re optimistic that this is one of those structures that need to be saved, so it won’t fall into the Hudson,” Mr. Spano said.

In a way, the facility can seem to have been fighting tides since the start. Wealthy nearby property owners opposed it for blocking views, according to historical accounts. And in 1922, soon after the coal-based facility opened to power the New York Central Railroad, much of it wasn’t needed, as it began to run on oil.

In recent years, neighbors called it the Gates of Hell, after reports that it hosted gang initiation rituals. And in the mid-2000s, in a controversial move, the Remi Companies, a developer, proposed lopping off the smokestacks in favor of an apartment tower.

As power needs change, old plants seem to be ripe for redevelopment. The 1950s Seaholm plant in Austin, Tex., for example, is expected to add retail tenants.

Also, other industrial spaces outside New York City have gravitated toward art, like Dia:Beacon, a museum inside a former Nabisco box printing factory just a few train stops away.

But the PowerHouse may most directly compete with the Park Avenue Armory, a cavernous 55,000-square-foot space dating to 1881 on the Upper East Side that has put on a steady stream of cultural programs in the last decade. Today, it stages about one visual arts show a year, in a space that can fit 1,800 people, said Rebecca Robertson, president of the group that is leasing the armory from the state.

But she said the rivalry may be overblown. “There are so many artists that we are interested in working with and so many proposals that we can’t accommodate because of time.”

In the meantime, Ms. Goren is shopping for other old, convertible properties; in late May, she bought the Alder Manor, a former mansion designed by Carrère and Hastings just up the road in Yonkers that has seen more opulent days.

It, and other buildings, will become part of a portfolio she calls the Plant, which is also the phrase on the license plate of her Cadillac Escalade. “I guess you could say,” she said, “that I’m attracted to very magical spaces.”